When I was diagnosed with scabies, I used a lot of different things on my skin. Whether it was from the toxic creams I had to use or the mites themselves, I don’t know, but I broke in a huge rash, twice. It happened to me when I first started my treatment, and I had a relapse about two weeks after treatment finished. Even though the scabies were dead, my skin was still reacting strongly with rashes and itching.

This is completely normal – scabies symptoms often continue for some time after the mites are dead, as your body’s immune system fires up to try and deal with a foreign attacker. It takes some time to settle back down again.

I visited my dermatologist to see what the issue was, and he told me exactly that – your immune system is firing up, and you need to settle it down. He prescribed me two weeks of Prednisone and some antihistamines.

Now, if you haven’t heard of Prednisone, it’s a pretty serious drug. It is a synthetic corticosteroid, which helps prevent your body’s immune response getting out of control. This helps reduce inflammation and allergies quickly, but it has some pretty serious side effects too. Obviously, any drug that messes with your hormones is going to have some knock-on effects.

As you might have noticed from the rest of this site, I prefer to look to natural treatments in times like this. I have absolutely nothing against medicine, and have taken Prednisone in the past for a more serious issue. However, a bad rash isn’t a worthy issue in my opinion.

Note: Remember I am not a doctor. If your doctor has prescribed Prednisone, it is up to you to decide whether your issue is serious enough to take it or not. Listen to your body. It is not a bad drug, just one that should be used responsibly.

Instead of taking Prednisone, I decided to just try and support my immune system as much as possible. Along with loading up on Vitamin C and fish oils, I found my secret weapon: Turmeric.

Why turmeric?

If you haven’t heard, turmeric is the natural Prednisone. It is not as potent nor as fast-acting, but it’s completely natural, healing, and supports the body in many other ways.

Turmeric contains curcumin, which is where its yellow color comes from. It is an extremely strong anti-inflammatory and also a strong antioxidant. Native communities have known about this for many years, which is why turmeric has a strong history of being used medicinally.

While this is the main reason for taking turmeric, it also has a host of other, even more important benefits. It lowers heart disease, boosts brain function, is helpful in treating Alzheimers and depression, has strong anti-aging properties, and has even shown promise in cancer studies. You can read all about these benefits, with associated studies, in this article.

Anyway, onto that recipe!

The Best Turmeric Tea Recipe

There’s one thing I need to clear up first: When it comes to scabies specifically, this tea is a supportive treatment. Turmeric does not kill scabies.

However, if you’ve been through scabies before, you’ll know that beating scabies isn’t just about killing the mites. In fact, if you use the correct treatments, technically you can kill scabies in one day. What can be challenging is the heavy recovery period that occurs afterwards. After having mites and eggs causing havoc under your skin, your body reacts. Your immune system fires up. It’s not rare for your skin to break out and to get the dreaded “post-scabies itch”, where itching and rashes can continue for weeks or months after the mites are dead.

What is important during this time is to rest, recover, and support the skin to heal, and this is true for many illnesses. A big part of that is reducing inflammation in the body and skin and settling the immune system down. Prednisone is great at that, but as we’ve discussed, it’s not the most gentle drug. The turmeric tea recipe I’ll share below is a great middle ground – a way for us to support the immune system, but with natural treatments that are nourishing to the body as well.

The amazing thing about this recipe is, while I started drinking it during scabies, I now drink it almost every day (I am literally drinking a cup as I write this). Not only is it exceptionally good for you, it’s delicious as well. It’s one of my favorite things to drink while I’m winding down at night. I love the idea that my body will use all these nutrients while I’m sleeping to help me recover for the next day. And not only have I been drinking it every day, I’ve been tweaking the recipe to get it just perfect. That’s the recipe I’m about to share with you below.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need:

Organic Turmeric Powder

Because we are actually ingesting this turmeric and not just using it in a body/face mask, I suggest using something top quality. I currently use the Organic Turmeric from Feel Good Organics. It’s a beautiful, bright orange that really stands out and smells particularly potent. Love it!

Organic Ginger Powder

We all know that ginger is a superfood, but it’s particularly useful for us in this tea. Similar to an Advil, ginger blocks the production of inflammation by the body, which is exactly what we’re trying to do here. Ginger is also a great supporting your immune system, along with countless other health benefits. Again, as we’re ingesting this product we want to get something top quality. I use the ground ginger root from Simply Organic – it’s perfect.

Organic Cinnamon Powder

Cinnamon tastes amazing, but most people don’t know it’s also a very effective anti-inflammatory. It’s also used to help lower blood sugar and for its high load of antioxidants. Because it is so versatile (you can add it to tea, coffee, milk, cakes, cereal, or basically anything sweet), many nutritionists encourage you to eat a little bit every day. When mixed with the ginger, it really gives a kick to this tea, as you’ll see.

One thing you should know about cinnamon is there are two predominant types – there is ceylon cinnamon, which is the true cinnamon from the ceylon tree in Sri Lanka and India, and there is cassia cinnamon, which is a cheaper, more popular type and has a far inferior nutritional profile and can even be harmful in higher doses. I highly recommend you get a quality, organic, ceylon cinnamon from India or Sri Lanka. I use this product from Frontier Co-op, it’s organic, fair trade, and imported direct from Sri Lanka.

Organic Cacao Butter

This is my secret ingredient! If you haven’t heard of cacao butter before, let me tell you about it. The cacao bean is what we use to make chocolate. Cacao butter is produced from the cold pressing of raw cacao beans, to give you a rich, dense, natural and healthy fat that is full of nutrients. Not only is it good for heart health, cholesterol and brain function, it’s a powerful anti-oxidant as well. This will really give your tea a creamy richness and a light chocolate flavor – trust me, it’s delicious.

As you might guess, there are a lot of crappy cocoa products out there, so make sure you get the best. I use Terrasoul’s Organic Cacao Butter – I love Terrasoul and use a lot of their products, this one is no different. Not the cheapest, but quality is second to none.

Organic Honey or Maple Syrup

Even though honey is great for you, I use this as a sweetener more than anything. Using refined sugar is not good for the body and defeats the whole purpose of making such a healthy drink. To be honest all honeys taste the same to me so I order a different one every time, but I like to use a raw and organic honey just to make sure there are no nasty preservatives in it. The last one I ordered was this one from Nature Nate’s, which was great.

Himalayan Pink Salt

You can just use regular sea salt if you want, or any unrefined salt, but I prefer the milder flavor of Himalayan Pink Salt. We’re only going to use a small sprinkle just to bring out the sweetness of the tea, so you don’t need anything fancy. I like the Himalayan salt from Terrasoul, but again, regular salt will be fine.

Black Peppercorns

Remember the curcumin in turmeric that was so good for us? Well, there’s a problem with it: It isn’t very well absorbed by the body. That’s where black pepper comes in. Black pepper contains piperine, which improves absorption of curcumin by up to 2,000%. Just a small pinch of black pepper will help us supercharge the effectiveness of this tea. However, we need to make sure it’s freshly ground black peppercorns, not the cheap ground black pepper you get for 25 cents. These peppercorns by Simply Organic come in a grinder bottle and are perfect for this.

(If you want to get super serious, you could just use pure piperine, but it’s not necessary).

Almond or Coconut Milk

I originally used coconut milk for this tea, but found it too rich. I started using almond milk and in my opinion the flavor is much better. You can also mix it half and half, which is what I do sometimes. Regular milk works as well, but I prefer to keep the tea plant-based just as personal preference. Any regular almond milk such as this one will do.

The Turmeric Tea Recipe

This is a serving for one – if you want to make it for more people, just multiply the quantities below as you like.

• 2 cups of coconut or almond milk
• 1 teaspoon of organic turmeric powder
• Half teaspoon of organic cinnamon powder
• One quarter teaspoon of organic ginger powder
• 3-4 small pieces of cacao butter (don’t put too many, or the tea will be very oily)
• A pinch of salt
• Quarter teaspoon of freshly ground black peppercorns

How to make it

Once you’ve got the ingredients together, this is the easiest tea in the world.

• Put the milk in a pot and bring to a low boil.
• Add all the ingredients one by one and mix slowly.

Once everything has boiled into a rich, creamy tea, it’s ready to drink. Usually it takes about five minutes. That’s it! Simply pour into a cup and enjoy.

Quite note: If for any reason you’re unable to get all these ingredients together and/or make this daily, there’s another option. You could instead take a curcumin and piperine supplement such as this, which should give you much of the benefit of the tea without the time commitment. Of course it’s not as good, but it’s a decent second option for those who need it.

How often should you drink it?

Like I said, I first started drinking this when I got prescribed Prednisone. I was drinking it twice a day for about a week before my symptoms improved. For reference – I was also using a steroid cream on my skin to help clear things up. I wanted to avoid Prednisone, but creams I have no problem with.

After that, I started drinking it just once a day, usually at night, and I still do that now even months later. I just love the tea and love all the healthy ingredients in it. The great thing is, you can change the turmeric for something else, like cacao powder or matcha powder, and it’s just as delicious! So I like to mix it up as well. Either way, if you’re drinking it to boost your immune system through a tough time, whether it’s a skin condition like scabies or something else, twice a day is a good number to aim for. Once you’re healthy, just drink it whenever you want, it’s packed with goodness and you can’t go wrong.

Hope you enjoy it!

Jon

P.S. If you’re here because you’re suffering from scabies, I highly recommend you check out my scabies treatment guide. It’s the exact collection of treatments I used to kick my scabies in around 14 days, and they’re all home treatments you can get easily on Amazon or your local health store. Click here to go there now.